How is that any different from "buying" a digital rental on Amazon that expires after some length of time?
Realistically - there is a considerable difference in the resources required to create a digital copy of a good vs a physical copy. The digital good has the slight upside that when companies abuse consumers through predatory pricing practices (literal rent-seeking...), they are destroying slightly less of the environment in the process.
Like, yes, someone invested a lot of capital up front and hopes to make a profit by selling time-limited access to what they bought, thereby making the goods accessible to people who don't have the up-front capital.
I can see preferring to own, but as a moral position, "rent-seeking" is synonymous with "risk-taking" and "access-providing."
For my part I am very happy to be able to rent a digital movie for $4 rather than buying a DVD for $20. The risk to me is lower and I'm more likely to try movies I wouldn't take a $20 chance on.
In this scenario, the predatory pricing is a key aspect of how it becomes rent seeking, and a well-functioning market would not have predatory pricing. And the root issue is tied in to how current US copyright law has major flaws.
Someone making content and renting it out wouldn't count, while say the App Store fee would.
As a developer, I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from the Apple App Store. You know how much value the App Store provided me? Way, way more than the 30% I paid (this was years ago).
Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.
So we can debate fair pricing, but the idea that aggregators don’t provide any value isn’t an indictment of aggregators, it’s a confession of not understanding the business.
Good point. Another often unappreciated point is that it's way easier to convince people to give their credit card to Apple than it is to convince them to give it to some random web site. Especially if they've already given their credit card to Apple, as many of them have.